Case Report: Sleep-Related Painful Erections After Sexual Intercourse

A new case report says that a 40-year-old man went through painful erections in his sleep after having sex.

Many men get erections while they’re asleep, but only a few men have the rare condition of having frequent painful erections when they sleep.

“In the following years, little research was published on [sleep-related painful erections] SRPE. Even now, the phenomenon of SRPE is not well understood. In the acute moment, the patient with SRPE wakes up because of deep pain inside the erect penis. This pain can be relieved by physical exercises (e.g., abduction and flexion of the hips and walking) or by cooling of the penis with ice cubes or a cold shower.”

But what happens if your SRPE symptoms are influenced by your sex life?

Apparently, the man would wake up several times a night in pain, but this only happened if he had sex and ejaculated in the night before falling asleep.

“The duration of the intercourse did not make any difference; if he ejaculated during intercourse before he went to sleep, SRPE would occur in any case. After masturbation, he experienced no problems at all.”

So what did he do? He stopped having sex as much. Sadly, that got in the way of his relationships, so he eventually looked for a doctor to help him.

After the man rejected pharmacological solutions, because he didn't want to be "a patient" at his age, the doctors suggested that he start having sex at different times in the day… and that worked!

Now, the man has had very few SRPE symptoms in the past 3.5 years (and only when he had sex and ejaculated in the night before falling asleep).

Sadly, he’s still having bad luck in the love department, but he’s used these experiences to change his life and career around.

“In the last 3 years, he has had some short-lived relationships. He now is a schooled practitioner of tantric sex (defined by him as practices in which slow, mindful, non-orgasmic sexual union, or masturbation creates a path to the experience of spiritual ecstasy) and aims to eliminate all orgasms, both during intercourse and masturbation.”